Somebody must have downloaded this, right? Anybody got a copy?
Many of the never-before-published documents and photographs Vaughan unearthed became key components of the web series, appearing only online and not in printed versions of the series. These weren’t just extras, but key chapters of the story, told digitally. And when the website disintegrated after the Rocky’s closure, these stories weren’t relegated to an old box on an unreachable shelf; they were gone.
If a sprawling Pulitzer Prize-nominated feature in one of the nation’s oldest newspapers can disappear from the web, anything can.
Mark Z. Jacobson, professor of Civil and Environmental Engineering at Stanford gave a talk at the New School in 2012 about the economics of renewable energy.
Bloomberg on some promising trends in U.S. energy production.
For the first time, widespread adoption of renewables is effectively lowering the capacity factor for fossil fuels. That’s because once a solar or wind project is built, the marginal cost of the electricity it produces is pretty much zero—free electricity—while coal and gas plants require more fuel for every new watt produced. If you’re a power company with a choice, you choose the free stuff every time.
It’s a self-reinforcing cycle. As more renewables are installed, coal and natural gas plants are used less. As coal and gas are used less, the cost of using them to generate electricity goes up. As the cost of coal and gas power rises, more renewables will be installed.
From a concept kitchen developed by IKEA, IDEO, and design students from Lund University and Eindhoven University of Technology.
While we often see smart refrigerators as in concept kitchens, IKEA and the designer believe that fridges will become obsolete in the future due to their energy inefficiency. Rather, people will store food much as how they have done so in the past—using materials that are naturally insular, such as cooling ceramic, to keep items as fresh as possible. People will no longer buy groceries on a weekly basis, but with automatic delivery from drones and the like, fresh food will be just as easy to get on demand.
“Clear containers that display the state of food and serve as a visual reminder to eat before it goes bad.”
See also: MoMA’s 2010 design exhibition, Counter Space.
The film world received dreadful news this week when it was discovered that the famed Belgian filmmaker and pioneer of modern feminist cinema Chantal Akerman had died. She is well known for her breakout film, directed at age 25, Jeanne Dielman, 23 quai du Commerce, 1080 Bruxelles (1975), which depicts several hours in the domestic life of a single mother who is also a sex worker.
Mitigating the sad circumstance of Akerman’s passing, the Criterion Collection, an American film distribution company known for its discriminating supply of virtuoso filmmakers, has made its entire catalogue of Akerman’s work available for viewing on Hulu for free.
Do check out Jeanne Dielman. It’s very slow paced, but that pace feels deliberate and effective. The subtlety of the photography and sound design manages to hold your attention for 3-plus hours. However, you may want to seek out the film elsewhere if you don’t have a paid Hulu account. The relentless advertising significantly shifts the viewing experience. I appreciate the gesture of the Criterion Collection licensing this as they have, but such a quiet, poised film easily gets overwhelmed by schlocky ads.
As a coding exercise for a course I’m teaching this semester I created this single-serving site serializing Moby Dick into tiny individual texts. Remember single-serving sites? Sadly many of those domains have expired, but one of the best of them—Barack Obama Is Your New Bicycle—is still there, if a bit quaint. I ruthlessly stole the design.
Here’s Maciej Cegłowski giving a talk on the hazards of Big Data.
The current model of total surveillance and permanent storage is not tenable.
If we keep it up, we’ll have our own version of Three Mile Island, some widely-publicized failure that galvanizes popular opinion against the technology.
At that point people who are angry, mistrustful, and may not understand a thing about computers will regulate your industry into the ground.
Theory of Everything recently posted an addendum to last year’s Enchanting by Numbers. Both episodes are very worthwhile, and both include the same segment talking about how misunderstood Facebook algorithms are to most of its users.
Be sure to listen to the interview with Suw Charman-Anderson, founder of Ada Lovelace Day, which is today! That part starts at 14:30 in part 1.
Margaret Hamilton oversaw the guidance software on the Apollo program. Thanks to sophisticated error-handling in that code, her engineering efforts prevented an abort of the Apollo 11 landing.
Three minutes before the Lunar lander reached the Moon’s surface, several computer alarms were triggered. The computer was overloaded with incoming data, because the rendezvous radar system (not necessary for landing) updated an involuntary counter in the computer, which stole cycles from the computer. Due to its robust architecture, the computer was able to keep running; the Apollo onboard flight software was developed using an asynchronous executive so that higher priority jobs (important for landing) could interrupt lower priority jobs.
Margaret Hamilton standing next to listings of the actual Apollo Guidance Computer (AGC) source code
This was on a 2 MHz machine with 1 MB of RAM. Even the term software engineering was coined by Hamilton, who also helped develop “concepts of asynchronous software, priority scheduling, end-to-end testing, and human-in-the-loop decision capability.”
A safe mantra to keep in mind with software is “all software has bugs,” which so often means “don’t expect too much.” Margaret Hamilton was instrumental in creating processes to ensure that software can systematically accommodate surprises and continue functioning as expected.
A fan of the space program, Kipp Teague, has uploaded a huge trove of Apollo mission photo scans onto Flickr. They’re organized into albums, but rather overwhelming as a collection, unless you want to just page through thousands of space photos (which, I mean, yeah why not?).
Apollo 7 Hasselblad image from film magazine 4/N – Earth Orbit
Digg has posted a smaller “best of” selection if you want to see just the highlights.
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If you’ve heard of the photographer Dorothea Lange, there’s one iconic image you probably associate with her.
Dorothea Lange. “Destitute pea pickers in California. Mother of seven children. Age thirty-two. Nipomo, California”
There’s an online tool that answers questions like “what else did Lange photograph at the pea fields in San Luis Obispo county?”
Dorothea Lange. “Migrant agricultural worker’s family. Seven hungry children. Mother aged thirty-two. Father is native Californian.”
Photogrammar is an impressive database from Yale “organizing, searching, and visualizing the 170,000 photographs from 1935 to 1945 created by the United States Farm Security Administration and Office of War Information (FSA-OWI).”
1969: Buzz Aldrin, Michael Collins and Neil Armstrong,](http://phiffer.org/wp-content/media/2015/10/164FU-980x980.jpg)
